Seeking Hope For Spinal Cord Injuries

LA GRANGE — Mark Johnson`s story (Tempo, Dec. 30) reminded me of a long-gone TV series that claimed, ``There are a million stories in the Naked City.`` This excellent article suggests almost that many other but related stories.

It`s reassuring to know that Marc Buoniconti is doing as well as he is in the context of a severe spinal cord injury; that he has a strong and loving family; and that he can afford horrendous hospital bills, a $10,000 wheelchair, an accessible, usable home and continuing and expensive therapy.

There are thousands of similarly injured people who have the same love and support, but don`t have the financial resources to afford $10,000 wheelchairs and other luxuries (if one can use that word) so useful to severely disabled people. Even sadder are the thousands who have neither the financial means nor the love and support of a family or friends. But Marc can only be considered lucky in a relative sense.

Beth Roscoe, executive director of the Miami Project, was quoted as saying, ``Nobody knew what a spinal cord injury was until Buoniconti got hurt.`` This is painfully close to the truth. But there is a history that involved people should know because it can help to understand the present state of the art in spinal cord injury treatment and research.

Early Egyptian and Greek writings mention spinal cord injury with gloomy prospects for treatment or survival. This attitude prevailed for centuries. In the early 1900s, a Spanish neuroscientist first suggested that the spinal cord might regenerate after an injury. In Boston in the `30s, Munro was rehabilitating spinal cord injuries before successful chemotherapy was available for deadly urinary infections. During World War II, spinal cord injury care systems were developing in England and Canada and in Army hospitals and VA hospitals in the United States.

Out of those systems came such pioneers as Freeman, Jousse, Guttmann, et al. Freeman was an early inspiration for Barth Green, whose obsessive dedication will inspire more young people. Research in the `50s and `60s kept the dream alive, followed by an expansion of basic research and clinical research and special treatment centers development in the `70s. It is with a mixture of gratitude and exasperation that many of us who have been involved for several decades hear almost annually of the new discovery that spinal cord injury is amenable to a cure through basic research. This particular wheel seems subject to a long and continuing reinvention.

Marc`s father, Nick, speaks of the federal contribution of $16 million to spinal cord injury research as criminal. At about the time he was playing football, the contribution was zero. The National Spinal Cord Injury Association (formerly National Paraplegia Foundation), Paralyzed Veterans of America and the National Committee for Research in Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke began work on the problem in the late `60s to bring that contribution to its present level.

While the needs for spinal cord injury research are apparent to those of us intimately involved, we have to understand that the granting agency

(National Institute for Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke) has to deal with more than 200 disease entities. Perhaps woefully inadequate would be a more diplomatic description than criminal. Those of us who have fought this battle for a very long time welcome Nick Buoniconti to our ranks with the admonition that we are more likely in a long war than a short battle.